Organized Mind : Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

id you ever wonder why, if someone asks you to name a bunch of red things, you can do it so quickly? It’s because by concentrating on the thought red, represented here by a neural node, you’re sending electrochemical activation through the network and down the branches to everything else in your brain that connects to it. Below, I’ve overlaid additional information that resides in a typical neural network that begins with fire truck—nodes for other things that are red, for other things that have a siren, and so forth.

limited and unlikely set of circumstances often pop to mind and overwhelm statistical information based on a large number of observations that would be far more accurate in helping us to make sound decisions about medical treatments, investments, or the trustworthiness of people in our social world. This fondness for stories is just one of many artifacts, side effects of the way our brains work.

The researchers hypothesized that this created a template by which their brains could organize and store just the sort of generalized information that would be necessary to succeed at the game.

When I was living among the Sotho, I went into the city one day with one of the villagers. The city is something he had no experience with. This was an intelligent and literate man—he had read the Bible, for example. But when he saw a television for the first time in a shop, he couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. The narrative conventions that we use to tell a story in film and TV were completely unknown to him. For example, one scene would end and another would begin at a different time and place. This gap was completely baffling to him. Or during a single scene, the camera would focus on one person, then another, in order to take another perspective. He struggled, but simply couldn’t follow the story. We take these for granted because we grew up with them.

degrees because they can’t move forward—they’re too perfectionistic. The real job in supervising PhD students isn’t teaching them facts; it’s keeping them on track.

Many, many PhD students fall into this category, never finishing their

This constant back-and-forth is one of the most metabolism-consuming things that our brain can do. We step out of time, out of the moment, and survey the big picture. We like what we see or we don’t, and then we go back to the task, either moving forward again, or backtracking to fix a conceptual or physical mistake. As you now know well, such attention switching and perspective switching is depleting, and like multitasking, it uses up more of the brain’s nutrients than staying engaged in a single task

One is the strong desire to conform to others’ behavior in the hope that it will allow us to gain acceptance within our social group, to be seen as cooperative and agreeable.

As the social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané say, “‘I didn’t want to get involved’ is a familiar comment, and behind it lies fears of physical harm, public embarrassment, involvement with police procedures, lost work days and jobs, and other unknown dangers.

Why are these interventions so often unsuccessful? Because of in-group and out-group bias, we tend to think that coercion will be more effective with our enemies than with ourselves, and conciliation will be more effective with ourselves than our enemies.